What Role Does Luck Play In Success?

Baseball player Lefty Gomez famously said that he'd rather be lucky than good, yet as a society we still tend to downplay the role luck plays in success, instead preferring to apportion success down to hard work and aptitude. It's a debate that has intensified as income inequality has risen throughout the world.

A recent study from the University of Catania in Italy attempted to understand just what role luck plays in our success (or failure). They've attempted to model human talent and how that talent is used throughout life. This model enabled them to explore how big a role chance plays in our outcomes.

The simulations the team ran were able to accurately reflect the wealth distribution we see in the real world, but what was really interesting is the talent distribution they observed. It wasn't those regarded as the most talented that became wealthiest, but rather those regarded as the luckiest.

The model works by assigning people a certain level of talent, which itself was made up of skill, ability, intelligence etc. Talent would be distributed randomly throughout the population sample, with a general bell curve style distribution.

Working life

The model tracks each individual through a typical 40 year working life, with random lucky or unlucky events sprinkled throughout. The lucky events increase their wealth whereas the unlucky ones reduce it. At the end of the simulation, each individual is ranked according to their wealth, with the team then able to delve into their 'life' to see just how that wealth came about, and whether any successful characteristics emerge. Being a computer simulation, this process is then repeated a few times to make sure the findings are robust.

Whilst the wealth was distributed broadly in accordance with real world observations, this wealth did not appear to be distributed according to talent. Indeed, the wealthiest individuals weren't anywhere near the top of the talent pile.

So what was responsible? Well, it appears as though it was pure luck. The team ranked the individuals in the experiment according to the luck they had experienced during the simulation, and the correlation between the amount of luck and overall wealth was clear, with the luckiest clustering near the top, and the unluckiest clustering near the bottom.

Influencing behavior

The team then applied their thinking to a real world example. They analyzed science research funding to explore three distinct funding methods:

Equal distribution of funding to all scientists

Random distribution of funding to a subset of scientists

Preferential funding to those who were successful in the past

When these strategies were tested, it emerged that the best was to simply divide the funding equally among all researchers, as this would promote the best outcomes in the future. The worst strategy was to use past success as a way of determining funding, with the obvious implication that the past success could have had a healthy dose of luck involved.

It's a finding that was confirmed in a separate study published a few years ago in Nature. The study was looking at basketball and whether success with a previous three point attempt would encourage the player to try again, which indeed was the case. Players fell into the trap of believing themselves to be on a hot streak of shots.

The research essentially shows however, that the success of the shot was shaped by unpredictable forces and depended on situational details that are unlikely to be repeated. The location of the shot, the pressure from the defense, the period in the match and so on all played a major part in the outcome.

The business world can often be gripped by the cult of the guru, whereby prominent thinkers proclaim to have found the secret to success in this or that field. They make their career out of informing the rest of us how to go about replicating such success.

What this study tells us however is that whilst individuals can contribute somewhat to their own success, there is also a considerable amount of fortune involved, with their success likely to have involved many other things in addition to their own greatness.

By all means learn from what you and others have done in the past, but don’t forget to treat the present as a completely fresh set of circumstances that require the fresh thinking that quite probably contributed to your past success. You won’t achieve your own hot hand by taking short-cuts.